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Kendall Lakes, January 6, 2008
Holly smiles for the camera as she adjusts her boots for the fun part
Kevin and I hooked up with Seth and Holly again on Sunday for another quick tour to the Kendall Peak area. After learning of Seth's background as a Cat. 1 road racer, I felt less guilty about letting him rock the trailbreaking in the 4 to 12 inches of new over a fairly firm crusty layer. This time we had a bit of company and a choice of several well-seasoned skin tracks to work with for the first stage of the climb up from the Pacific Crest Trailhead, so we made excellent time up to the regular west face of Kendall Peak for the first run.
The top was a bit tricky, with a breakable crust under a few inches of fresh, but the middle section of the run was smooth-like-buttah thick pow - you just had to watch out for frozen obstacles under the surface, some of which had become quite hard. It didn't take much effort to convince the crew to skin back up for another run, and we found a south-facing line through the trees that led us eventually to the Kendall Lakes. The lines off the top were nice and steep, and made for fun skiing after the top 8 inches or so sloughed off.
We had some company on the way up, with several groups of skiers stopping to chat or let us skin through, and some really large groups of snowshoers visible in the distance, but there was plenty of untracked to go around.
Getting back to the normal out-route took a bit more skinning, but after climbing back up to the "Knob" we were able to ski back to the grid-locked onramp to I-90 without re-applying the skins, and ending up with about 4,600 ft. of vertical for the day.
